The particular street signs, windows, and balconies on this street mark it as Parisian.
Paris, the city of light, is instantly recognizable---as long as you're looking at a photo of the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre. But could you recognize the city if the picture lacked a flashy landmark? (Try testing yourself here
---just don’t look at the text on signs.) If you find yourself stumped, know that a new software program has you beat: it can identify a city from a single photo
of any old street. Almost any street, the program's designers found, has little details that give away its city, including distinctive street signs, windows, and balconies. To program the new software
, researchers at Carnegie Mellon fed it 40,000 Google Street View images from 12 cities, including Paris and New York. These photos contained hundreds of millions of unique visual elements, creating a huge database that ...
